A friend of mine and I came up with an idea to run a mega-epic open table dungeon crawl over the course of an entire 3 days convention, and we have some questions and thoughts as to how to make it work. First, just to make clear, by open table we mean that players can sit down at the table freely (up to say, 5 players at once), pick up a character and join the crawl, until they had their fill or otherwise decide to leave the table. Meaning, players are free to come and go as they please, join and enjoy some time of dungeon crawl, and the crawl continues as long as there're people who dare venture into it.
Our questions:
- Is there a specific system or mechanic we should consider? We though of using D&D [5], for now we have no real experience with the system, but it seems like a good fit.
- How to deal with unbalanced parties? A couple of issues that came to mind are A) dealing with a single player that made it to mid-high level (let's say for simplicity that it's D&D and he's level 10) while the rest of the party are level 1; and B) A level 5 party suddenly are joined by a new level 1 character.
- How to deal with a clean slate situation while previous parties cleared a major chunk of the dungeon already? The easiest example being the first day of the con is over, the players so far made it to a third of the way down and the encounters in these levels are about level 6, what to do at the beginning of the 2nd day? Should we start over at level 1? Start at level 6? Respawn the monsters?
- Considering we really want the players to make it to the end of the dungeon by the end of the con (and not sooner of course), how many encounters should we plan?
- Any general tips and advice would also be appreciated. What are we missing that would make this event a blast to take part in?
Finally, we'd really appreciate any help and input, but what we're mostly looking for is people who have real experience running this sort of event (though I guess people who played in such an event can also be of help).
Thanks!